Deleting constituents with no gifts

Erin Pirkle

Hey everyone! My organization is starting the RE clean up process and one thing we want to do is delete constituents that have no gift history AND no address information. Some constituents were moved from a previous program and are not needed and are taking up space. Does anyone have experience with this or something similar? Thank you!

JoAnn Strommen

Welcome to the BB Community, @Erin Pirkle.

Yes, you can do that kind of clean up with a global delete. However, much caution is needed.

Some users might say keep every record forever, I don't agree. A record with no gifts and no address or other info does not have much value to me. How do you match an incoming gift with an address to just a name?

Do the records have any other info? Email? Phone? Attributes? Relationships? Any data that would be useful to your org in any way?

I would double and triple check the records for other info prior to deleting. If you have user rights to global delete you can use that process with a static constituent query based on ID#. Don't know the # you're considering, but I would do a small group and follow all the knowledgebase / user guide directions for doing this.

Erin Pirkle

Thanks for the information and for the reminder to check that the whole record is empty.

Most of the constituents I pulled have no address, gifts, relationships, attributes or other contact information.

I'm mainly looking for the best process to identify these constituents. I'll most likely still look at each record before deleting permanently

Dariel Dixon

I will pass on this link to an older community post. I gave my opinions there for what they are worth, but I think the conversation about grouping them is worth thinking about. I would imagine most people here would advise caution with this process. If you do try to create a query to do a global delete, I would ask you to triple check it and also ask around to find if there is a hidden or less than obvious reason for these records to be in the database.

Marilyn Armstrong

I'm with you on those empty records – no address, no gifts, no relationships, no events - they're just taking up space and get in the way. I've never done it globally, though. I'd query for certain pieces to produce a manageable list that I could go through individually and delete that way. Tedious and takes time but I felt more secure that way.

Nicholas Mascari

I agree with the other posts: Be very careful about the list you pull.

With that said, the actual query would look something like this

Criteria:

Summary Information → Summary For Gift → Total Number of Gifts equals 0

AND

Addresses → Preferred Address → Preferred Address Line 1 blank

You can then output whatever information your organization needs to look at before just deleting them all in one fell swoop. Like the other posts have said: Do they have attributes, relationships, prospect info, etc.? You may want to include those in your Query's output before making a final decision.

Then you (or whoever has access) can go to Admin → Globally Delete Records → pick Constituents and the query you saved earlier then run it.

If you have any questions let me know,

-Nick

Keith Wilson

Certainly in agreement with the others who have commented, but I don't see mention of Tribute Records. RE requires a Tribute to be a Constituent in order to create a Tribute Gift. We end up with a bunch of Constituent Records (obviously many are deceased) who have no address, no gifts, no attributes, etc. but they have tribute gifts linked to them. Really wish BB would create a way to do tribute gifts without requiring the Tribute to be a constituent.

Rachel Cavalier

Keith Wilson:

Certainly in agreement with the others who have commented, but I don't see mention of Tribute Records. RE requires a Tribute to be a Constituent in order to create a Tribute Gift. We end up with a bunch of Constituent Records (obviously many are deceased) who have no address, no gifts, no attributes, etc. but they have tribute gifts linked to them. Really wish BB would create a way to do tribute gifts without requiring the Tribute to be a constituent.

Would having a specific constituent record for these tributes work for you? Rather than creating new constituents with only names, perhaps just put that information on the tribute record of an In Memory constituent?